It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s ... a bear on Mars!
Well, you actually couldn’t have seen this one with the naked eye.
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Somewhere around 140 million miles away, a powerful camera operated by the University of Arizona has captured a photo of what appears to be a bear face on the red planet. Members of the university’s Lunar & Planetary Laboratory say the feature, which was photographed on Jan. 25, is made of several structures and craters.
“There’s a hill with a V-shaped collapse structure (the nose), two craters (the eyes), and a circular fracture pattern (the head),” wrote Alfred McEwen, principal investigator of HiRISE (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment). “The circular fracture pattern might be due to the settling of a deposit over a buried impact crater. Maybe the nose is a volcanic or mud vent and the deposit could be lava or mud flows?”
Here’s a more zoomed-in version of the bear-y unusual photograph:
The university’s HiRISE camera launched in 2005, arrived at Mars in 2006, and has been “imaging ever since,” officials say. The camera reportedly reimages locations “of special interest” by rolling the spacecraft left and right to obtain 3D images of the surface -- which are also called stereo pairs. HiRISE often shares images of the stereo pairs -- check them out by clicking here.
Some people in the newsroom said the HiRISE image looks like a creepy teddy bear. Does the Mars feature look like a bear to you?